Study: You Spent Way More Time on Your Application Than a Potential Employer Did Reviewing It

Slaving away for hours on a single job application? Hands off your keyboard, we’ve got news for you. It’s likely that an employer will spend less than 15 minutes reviewing that application, if someone reviews it at all.

A recent study by research firm Future Workplace and HR software company CareerArc revealed that short review time and other statistics based on a survey of about 1,200 job seekers and employers about the application process.

We’ve all been there: researching a company, writing a cover letter, preparing a profile, putting in hours of work for a single job application, just to find out that -- well, we actually never find out anything. From a pool of 767 job seekers, more than 60 percent admitted that they rarely or almost never receive notice of a company’s decision or status of a job application. Of those job seekers, a whopping 85 percent doubt that a human being ever even reviewed their application.

If that’s not discouraging enough, it’s not untrue. Nearly 40 percent of 357 employers admitted to using an automated pre-screening tool for candidates, and of those more than 60 percent agreed that it’s likely some qualified candidates were dropped in the process.

Throughout the survey, employers acknowledged that their process was probably discouraging to job seekers, but many said they were attempting to improve it. Roughly 40 percent of surveyed employers said that better communication with candidates throughout and after the application process was an important area of focus. Almost three quarters say they have or plan to invest more time, money and resources to improve the overall candidate experience.

Good thing, because four out of five seekers say they would probably not consider other job openings at a company that failed to notify them of their application status the last time.

Check out the infographic below for more statistics about the job process.